


Beacon

by Venivincere



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Major character death - not Harry or Snape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-26
Updated: 2014-12-26
Packaged: 2018-03-03 17:11:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2858564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Venivincere/pseuds/Venivincere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The caged bird stands on the grave of dreams, but still, it sings of hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beacon

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Team Wartime during the 2007 Snarry_Games. Prompt: Prisoner of war. Many thanks to Ac1d6urn and everyone else on Team Wartime who helped me thrash out this idea, though it's greatly changed from its beginnings. I feel so fortunate to be on a team with so many excellent members! A most heartfelt thank you to Themostepotente for her lightning beta skills!
> 
> Reposted on June 27, 2007 to Skyehawke here: http://archive.skyehawke.com/story.php?no=15506

When Harry Potter finally catches up with his last good memory, his second reaction is surprise that he's caught up at all.

His first reaction is a long, loud scream.

"Shut him up, Macnair," says a voice, and Harry quails. "Not with  _that_." 

A scrape and a clang later, Harry's fighting for breath behind a gritty, acrid hand. "Don't struggle, now, or I'll cut it all off."

Harry doesn't even blink at the threat, not with Voldemort in the room or the four other people who laugh at Macnair's threat, but Voldemort speaks again and Harry quits struggling so he can hear.

"How foolish of you, Harry Potter, to assume you were destroying me."

Right then, Harry wishes he could move out of Macnair's headlock; he hears rustling, then Voldemort is hovering above him, leaning on the narrow table where Harry lay, pressing against his arm. Harry's skin crawls and everything low in his gut turns to jelly.

"Did you think that by eliminating my last Horcrux you have weakened me?" Voldemort smiles, a gentle, teasing thing. He pries Macnair's fingers one by one off Harry's mouth and replaces them with his own. "Foolish, foolish boy."

Voldemort's thumb rubs against Harry's cheek, a rough, scaly touch, the musty, cloying scent of him creeping into Harry's senses. Harry retches.

"Such a sensitive thing, aren't you." Voldemort looks up as another face appears in Harry's vision. Harry finds himself staring, instead, into dead, black, eyes. "Severus, you never told me."

"I never knew." Snape's left eyebrow raises a tiny fraction.

"I think I'll like living in his body."

Snape's dead, black eyes suddenly flame to life.

::-------------------------------------:: 

" _Petrificus Totalis._ "

He's lost count, now, how many days start just like this, but once again, sparks dig into Harry's skin where the bony wand trails over it. Sickening as it is to feel them spike through him, keeping him pinned more effectively than physical bonds, Harry's learnt to ignore them enough to pay attention. Time is running out; Harry can tell by the questions Voldemort asks.

"The potions -- they won't change his sensitivity, I trust?"

"I shouldn't think so, my lord," Snape replies. "They are designed to facilitate the transfer. The text mentions nothing about any lasting effects."

Harry lays there and sighs. Somewhere along the way, he must have grown up because the only things he feels in the face of the imminent death of his soul is disappointment and resignation to his fate. It never is a matter of skill when he finds himself in a sticky situation, and Harry's never had implicit faith in the rightness of the world.

So he lays there and listens rather blankly when Voldemort asks Snape how long the potions will take to finish, when the optimal time to begin chanting the incantation is, how long the transfer of his soul into Harry's body will take. That last does raise Harry momentarily out of his malaise, enough to shudder, enough to make his stomach roil.

Perhaps Voldemort thinks Harry's reacting to the sparks tracing over his shivering skin because he draws the tip of his wand over Harry's naked body ever faster in an increasingly unreadable design, forging a pathway to absolutely nowhere. Until Snape speaks, and that's when he stops, and also why.

"My lord, you may wish to refrain from mingling your magic in any way before you perform the ritual. It may weaken the vessel."

Without Voldemort in his line of sight, Harry relies on the set, dead tone in Voldemort's voice to determine that he is angry. Snape's angry, too; not once since Voldemort announced he is taking over Harry's body has Snape referred to Harry by name. He refers to Harry as the container, or the vessel, or if he's feeling that Harry's even remotely human, he calls him the boy.

"Pity," says Voldemort, removing his wand and sniffing, "but I shall not take chances with the future household of my soul."

And that's the crux of it, Harry thinks. His soul is going to die, it's going to get mauled in a dogfight with Snape's potions and turned into sludge, and be vomited out in an orgy of expurgation. He thinks of Voldemort taking up residence, sweeping out the corners and tut-tutting at the ashes and gall left behind. Voldemort's going to crown himself king in the glory of a fresh, youthful body. Ascending once more to the title of prince, Snape will sit at Voldemort's right hand: a noble consort, and dark.

Harry laughs, a delirious, choked little sound. Once, the sun used to rise, and Harry measures time by the demarcation between that diurnal event and the eternal damp of the godforsaken, windowless wreck they're holed up in. Once, in the time of light, Harry had an inappropriate crush on that erstwhile prince. Harry cherished it for what it was, a dirty little secret shrinking from all that light. But here, here in the dark, the shredded remnants of that crush are a pitiful beacon of hope, flickering, and almost extinct.

What would it be like to live a life devoid of humiliation and irony? What would it be like to be the lover of some nice, normal girl? Harry thinks of Ginny, and (shamefully) Hermione, and knows he will never be allowed anything more than a short time longer as fate's bitch. Dumbledore said it's our choices that define us, but Harry thinks he's defined by the lack of them. Or, maybe, their poor quality. He laughs again, but it comes out as a groan.

"Something funny, Potter?"

It's the first time Snape's talked to him since his captivity, and it takes Harry a moment to realize it's because Voldemort's left the room. Still, he exercises what little choice he has left and refuses to answer.

A slap brings the fire to his cheek and Harry flushes with rage. " _Fuck_  you!" He shouts, but it comes out soft and hoarse. He hasn't spoken to anyone in weeks. "Just -- fuck you!" Harry tries to roll away, cheek throbbing, but finds his wrist caught in an iron-band squeeze. Then his ear is surrounded by Snape's warm, damp breath.

"He may return at any moment, Mr. Potter. Do not give him reason to return any sooner."

"What do you care?" says Harry, but he doesn't scream it -- he's far too shocked that Snape's spoken to him at all.

"You never learn, do you?"

Harry feels a pushing at his mind, and suddenly he's remembering things: the chanting as he clung to his bucking broom, the stalling of Umbridge when she threatened Harry with Veritaserum, the inexplicable lecture from Snape as he fled the scene of Dumbledore's murder,  _I am not a coward_ , and suddenly, Harry sees the truth of the matter.

"You're still on our side, aren't you?"

"Shut up, you fool," whispers Snape, chapped lips rough against Harry's ear. "Shut up!"

But Harry doesn't. "They aren't -- these potions, they're not --"

" _Must I kill you to shut you up?_ " And then he's grabbing Harry's cheeks and locking eyes with him, just as mean and nasty as ever, but that pitiful beacon flames to life and Harry finds himself falling up, up, into the snapping black eyes suddenly in front of his own. The barest of inches later and his lips meet Snape's. Suck, sucking them, he's thirsting, he's dying for them, but of course, Snape draws away with a strangled look and petrifies him. But the heat has burst out, now, refuses to be repackaged, indignant to have been kept waiting so long and unwilling to subside, and Harry's trapped, all wet lips and grasping hunger, frozen in place hard.

"My, my, Severus." and thank Merlin Voldemort seems amused. "Jumping the gun, are we?"

Suddenly, Harry knows more than he ever wanted to about the secrets Snape keeps, they're depraved, they're  _sick_ , and God, Snape really  _is_  brave, isn't he?

Snape turns to Voldemort and says, with all apparent sincerity, "Apparently, I cannot wait, my lord," and smiles, wry and just a little bit shy.

Harry barely has time to register his amazement at Snape's surpassing acting skills when Voldemort says, in a voice Harry's never heard before, "Tonight?" And Snape answers "Tonight."

"Do not touch him again, Severus."

Harry's stomach begins to quake and he's thankful that he's cut off from the expression of his fears. He would never have managed as well as Snape has, he's sure of it, and maybe now he knows why Snape is so petty and cruel when left to his own devices.

"I won't, my lord," says Snape, and Voldemort leaves to go wherever it is he goes when he's not tormenting Harry with his questions and his anticipation.

"Say nothing, Potter, and if you have an ounce of brains left in your head,  _follow my lead!_ " And he's kissing Harry again, kissing hard. This kiss, this is the defiance of a hero, thinks Harry, and he's awed into silence, swept whirlwind fashion into Snape's orbit. He won't hurt me, Harry marvels in a quiet corner of his head. A streak of moisture runs down into his hairline and into his ear, and in his mind, he is grinning.

::-------------------------------------:: 

The potion is heartache from the moment it touches Harry's lips.

"It will feel to him, my lord, as though an increasing number of Dementors were in the room," says Snape. "In the end, his soul will find his body an uninhabitable place and leave it. At the moment his soul rises out of him, you must throw yourself across his body, heart to heart, and chant the incantation, concentrating very hard on keeping your hearts as close together as you possibly can. Yet you must not block his mouth, or the soul cannot rise unimpeded out his body. The process will take several minutes to complete."

"Then let us begin!"

Dementors -- Harry's not quite sure how to depict that, because he doesn't know how much Voldemort knows about his reaction to them. He decides that rubbing his arms would at least show that he were cold.

He needn't have bothered.

The first swallow ices his gut, sending chill tendrils racing through his veins, freezing him from the inside, out. The gooseflesh bursts forth on his arms and legs. 

Perhaps it isn't the potion at all. Perhaps it is fear causing the gooseflesh to rise, or maybe cold, lonely despair. The potions work... it is a case of hate, after all, hatred and betrayal, and really, he should have known. The calm breaks off, brittle and cracked, and Harry cries out in his heart for his very last hope, dashed. That beacon gutters in the throes of extinction and he thrashes about, or tries to, so Snape binds him "for his safety, my lord, so he does not fall during the transfer and injure you both." The edges of his vision go black, his mind swirls, but the feeling doesn't intensify. He feels another chalice at his lips.

"This one should freeze him to the point where he is immobilized, and begin to wrench his soul up by the roots."

Harry gulps.

He expects cold-fingered death. He expects pain, maybe, he expects that he will leave his senses and begin to wander in the shadows.

Instead, he feels the warmth bloom back inside of him, though his skin remains icy on the surface. In Harry's heart, Snape blazes white.

"He should be close, now, my lord. Look for his eyes to roll up in his head and shut," and Harry feels a pinch where Snape hovers over him, a pinch in a place Voldemort can't see. "You must throw yourself across him when it happens."

Harry takes his cue, and his eyes roll up, but he almost blows the game when Voldemort's body rests on his own. It's all he can do to keep from retching. But Voldemort begins chanting, his voice resonating through Harry's chest, and suddenly there's a bony piece of wood in Harry's hand and he knows what it is, it's Voldemort's wand, and Snape's pinching him again.

He musters every last hatred in his soul and casts them out through the wand into the body on top of him.

::-------------------------------------:: 

Several months after Harry passes back into the light, another significant demarcation of time, he thinks that maybe it isn't the light that shows up dirty little secrets.

"I didn't know until I drank the second potion whose side you were on," Harry says one day, and it's more than they've ever said about it, together in private.

"Isn't it obvious?" says Snape. Harry feels a push into his mind, and he remembers: Snape throwing himself between Harry and the werewolf that was Lupin, Snape detaining him in the corridor, preventing him catching up with Karkaroff, Snape choosing his words with the care of a poet when Harry tells him in front of everyone that Sirius had gone to the ministry. "I had many entanglements, Harry, but when it came to  _sides_ , I was always on yours. Always."

It isn't the light that shows up dirty little secrets, Harry thinks, it's the shadow of shame that stains them. Nothing he does with Snape, nothing he has with him, is shameful. Not anything. For all the months have done to dull the memory of his captivity and despair, however much they've drained the impact of those emotions, Snape is still his lover, petty, grumpy and irascible as they come. But, first and foremost, he is a beacon of hope: he is a bright white light that burns through the shadow of shame like the sun through fog.

\--fin-- 


End file.
